Jōmon pot
From Japan, early Jōmon period, about 5,000
BC
Skill in pottery has been an important
defining aspect of Japanese culture from earliest time.
There are pottery fragments from Aomori in northern Japan which
date from about 14,500 BC, and are believed to be among the oldest
yet discovered anywhere in the world.
So-called 'Jōmon' wares were first discovered in 1877 at a site
known as the Ōmori shell-mound near Tokyo. Those examples were so
named by an American archaeologist, Edward S. Morse.
Jōmon means 'cord pattern' and the term describes the
characteristic surface patterns that were made with a twisted cord.
The name was later applied to the long period of well over 10,000
years of prehistory in the Japanese archipelago.
The Jōmon peoples were predominantly hunters, fishers and
gatherers and their pots were mainly used for boiling food and for
eating.
This bowl, which originally had a lid, has a well-defined rim
decoration of marks jabbed with a stick, bone, or finger-nail. The
main body has cord decoration.
The inside has been lacquered, probably sometime in the
seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when the vessel was briefly
used as a mizusashi (water jar) for the Tea Ceremony.
Japan
